has
stamped the version with something of his own--something thenceforward
inseparable from it, and yet characteristic of him. In the expression of
the triumph and despair of love, not sicklied over with any thought as
in most modern poets, only Catullus and Sappho can touch Burns. "Green
grow the Rashes O," "Yestreen I had a Pint of Wine," the farewell to
Clarinda, and the famous death-bed verses to Jessie Lewars, make any
advance on them impossible in point of spontaneous and unreflecting
emotion; while a thousand others (the number is hardly rhetorical) come
but little behind. "Willie brew'd a Peck o' Maut" in the same way rides
sovereign at the head of a troop of Bacchanalian verses; and the touches
of rhetoric and convention in "Scots wha hae" cannot spoil, can hardly
even injure it. To some it really seems that the much praised lines "To
Mary in Heaven" and others where the mood is less boisterous, show Burns
at less advantage, not because the kind is inferior, but because he was
less at home in it; but it is almost impossible to praise too highly the
equally famous "Mouse," and some other things. It was in this tremendous
force of natural passion and affection, and in his simple observation of
common things, that Burns' great lesson for his age and country lay.
None even of the reformers had dared to be passionate as yet. In Cowper
indeed there was no passion except of religious despair, in Crabbe none
except that of a grim contemplation of the miseries and disappointments
of life, while although there was plenty of passion in Blake it had all
conveyed itself into the channel of mystical dreaming. It is a little
pathetic, and more than a little curious, to compare "The Star that
shines on Anna's Breast," the one approach to passionate expression of
Cowper's one decided love, with any one of a hundred outbursts of Burns,
sometimes to the very same name.

The other division of the Poems, at the head of which stand _The Jolly
Beggars_, _Tam o' Shanter_, and _The Holy Fair_, exhibit an equal power
of vivid feeling and expression with a greater creative and observant
faculty, and were almost equally important as a corrective and
alterative to their generation. The age was not ill either at drama, at
manners-painting, or at satire; but the special kind of dramatic,
pictorial, and satiric presentation which Burns manifested was quite
unfamiliar to it and in direct contradiction to its habits and
crotchets. It had had a